Sunday, July 30, 2006

DML - Junior! (a.k.a. coming full circle)

Back in 1995/1996, i was doing my first commercial game project together with a friend of mine. The project was called "Junior" and it was a cute platformer game aimed at a young audience. We had a blast creating it and it was a valuable experience for me going through the whole process beginning to end.

Now, 10 years later i've decided to remake the game using the DML platform. Since the original game was done for MS-DOS and no source-material whatsoever is available anymore, i had to boot up some old EXE files to screencapture the graphics and get a sense of the level-design.

Anyways, i set for myself the task to create the game in a weeks time, this includes new graphics/leveldesign and music. So far i've been able to capture some of the original graphics and do a little work on the title screen and title music. Here's today's result:

Thursday, July 27, 2006

DML - New ports: Dreamcast & Nintendo DS

2 New ports for DML have been completed. The port for the Sega Dreamcast and for the Nintendo DS. I will post images of the various DML ports in action soon, but for now you'll have to do with this image of the dreamcast in action.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Vectrex - Spike Supersports

Some of you have been waiting for this for a while now, so here it is..
The first screens of Spike Supersports for the Vectrex.

Spike supersports is a sports game based on the Spike characters.The game features 5 different events: 100m dash, long jump, archery, 110m hurdles and key toss and can be played in single player mode, or multiple player. Each player canchoose any of the Spike characters (Spike, Molly and Spud) to play with. The game also supports the VecVox.

The game is making steady progress, but there is no expected release-date yet.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Atari 2600/Vectrex - Expandable!

I've just returned from holiday!.

While i've enjoyed the warm weather and nice atmosphere for most of the times, i've still been able to do a little work on a small game-project i came up with about 2 months ago. It is called "expandable" and its an unique game-concept i think. You're a spaceship and you'll have to pick up bonus-items while dodging the enemies. as the game progresses the size of your shield starts to increase, making it harder and harder to dodge the enemies. If the enemies penetrate your shield, you will loose energy.

During the vacation i was able to do a little prototype for the atari 2600 an vectrex. See the screenshots below. Let me know what you think.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Atari 2600 - Empire Strikes Back remake

While struggling to master the 2600, i figured i'll try to do a remake/update of a known 2600 game. One of the games i enjoyed playing on the 2600 was the 'empire strikes back' game by Parker Bros, but i was always annoyed by the very blocky walkers. So i did a little test on my version of the game. Its far from finished, and so far it only features a ship you can control and a scrolling background. I hope i can add some smoothly animated walkers in the future, but first i have to find out how to clip them properly on the edges. Anyway, here's a screen.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Gameboy - From the vault

I was browsing through some old cds today searching for some graphics and i stumbled upon some old sources of some gameboy things i worked on way back (1996-1999). I wasn't able to get a lot of it compiling, but i was able to assemble a small collection of early gameboy demos:

- techflex.gb - Techflex effect (DMG, 1996)
- parallax.gb - parallax scrolling demo (DMG, 1996)
- plasma.gb - plasma demo (DMG, 1996)
- dudewave.gb - Image wave effect (DMG, 1996)
- vectdemo.gb - 3d vector demo (DMG, 1996)
- matrixtrailer.gb - the matrix trailer (GBC, 1999)
- glowdemo.gb - glowdemo (GBC, 1999)

You can download the package here



Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Colecovision/MSX - Streetbrawl concept art

I've recently started work on the game streetbrawl for the MSX and Colecovision platforms. It will be a sidescrolling beat'em up game in the lines of vigilante and kung fu master. However, because of the technical limitations of the platform the game will be more or less and experiment to see if its doable. You can click here for a quick preview.

Monday, July 10, 2006

DML - DML 1.1 finished

DML 1.1 is now finished for WIN32, SDL and GP2X platforms.
The Dreamcast port is now in the works, however the dreamcast architecture poses some problems to i/o reading and such, so hopefully all will run smoothly. Sega Saturn development was also started, but testing the binaries is problematic. (I used to have a good solution for this, but this required an ISA card, which aren't compatible with todays PCs).

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Devroom chaos!

Things are getting out of control in my devroom. At the moment i have no more power-sockets available, and my poor tv-set is hooked on 3 RGB scarts and 5(!!!) RF plugs :s
Find below 2 photos of the development room in current state (please note that this is the development room and not my collection room, all consoles are being used for developent :p). The room currently consists of 2 development PC's, 1 notebook, a vectrex, colecovision, MSX2, Commodore 64, Atari2600, GP2X, Sega Dreamcast and Sega Saturn.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

DML - Audio driver finished

I spent most of today finishing up the Audiodriver for my soon to be release media library called: DML . The library is a portable graphics&sound library, much like SDL, that allows direct-porting on a large range of platforms. It is set up in a way that it completely seperates the hardware layer from the modules that lay on top of it (modules for handling bitmaps, sprites, fonts, audio,etc.)

I hope to have the first public version 1.1 completed by next week. After that it will be porting mayhem :p Platforms planned are Win32, SDL, WinCE, Dreamcast, GP32, GP2X, Nintendo DS, PSP, PSone, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, PS2, NGC, GBA and more.